Kismet
by Cartographical
Summary: It's just Castle and Beckett. And a dog.
1. Chapter 1

**Notes: **Spoilers through _An Embarrassment of Bitches_. Big, slobbery, disgusting kisses to Cora Clavia and Jill, both of whom are always there to scratch my head and rub my belly and convince me that, just maybe, I am not quite as ridiculous as I think I am.

* * *

><p>He's only stopping by the Humane Society shelter to see if there's a dog like Royal, some adorably handsome Golden Retriever that will eat his steaks and snuggle endlessly with him on the couch, so of course he winds up with a gigantic, half-lame mutt.<p>

"That's Kismet," the helpful teenager guiding him through the kennels tells him after he pauses for the second time outside her pen. "She's been here a couple months now."

The dog is black, long hair, a splash of white on her chest and nose. She stares at him soulfully though the lattice of her wire pen. He winces. "Is that –" He's not sure how to put it delicately. "How long do you usually keep them, here?"

The girl – Elise, he finally remembers – sighs. "She doesn't have a lot longer with us. The staff just adores her, but she's such a big dog for any place in Manhattan, and the vet thinks she might have an old ACL tear in her right knee that gives her a little limp."

He squats to eye level with the dog. "How old is she?" he asks. He should keep moving. Seriously, this dog probably weighs as much as Beckett.

Elise is far trickier than he'd originally given her credit for, because she's opening the cage and snapping her leash to Kismet's collar as she answers. "Only two, but, you know, she's not a puppy anymore, which also isn't in her favor."

He really wasn't planning on getting a dog, but he did have this hazy ideal in his mind – he would catch eyes with a gorgeous canine from across the room, someone would let the dog out, and the animal would bolt at him, bowl him over, burrow gratefully into his chest, and he would just simply have no choice but to take it home with him.

Kismet walks out of her cage, looks him up and down appraisingly, and apparently finds him somewhat lacking, since she turns and starts to walk quietly away, her gait just slightly lopsided.

Elise scrunches her nose. "She does take a while to warm up to you," she says, tugging on the leash. Kismet obediently turns and faces Castle.

He leans forward, reaches out and rests a hand on the dog's head. She tolerates it. "Does the leg hurt her?" he asks.

"Not really – the vet just said it's not always entirely comfortable." Elise informs him.

He reaches a hand out to touch Kismet's leg. The dog abruptly backs away. "I'm not sure she likes me much," he tells Elise.

He looks up. Elise swallows, shrugs, bites her lip in something like an apology. "Once you get to know her, it's not really that. When she came here she had a piece of glass in her left hind paw. Most dogs, you'd notice it right away - they'd be stopping every two feet to pick up the leg, lick at it, you know. Kismet just walked around, determined that we wouldn't see it."

His chest hurts, a hollow kind of pain that pushes up against his sternum. "I'll take her," he says, not even so much aware of the words as he is of the monumental, overwhelming feeling that he cannot let this dog spend another minute without a home, without someone always there to watch carefully enough to see when she has glass in her foot.

Elise smiles. Castle smiles. Kismet sits, stares up at him, and tilts her head, as if to say, _what's the big deal?_

* * *

><p>"Why do you have a wildebeest?" Alexis asks when he walks in the door, dog in tow.<p>

"This," Castle announces proudly, "Is Kismet. Kizzy, we decided on the way over."

Alexis stares blankly at him.

"She's your new dog!"

Kizzy blinks. Alexis continues to stare. "Dad," she says, slowly, "I thought we decided a dog was a silly idea."

He'd pictured Alexis beaming and flinging herself onto their new pet, but this was also back when he pictured a moderately-sized, perfectly-proportioned Golden Retriever.

"A normal dog, yes. Kismet, no," he says, trotting to the hall closet to get the bowls and food and toys from when Royal was in residence. He pauses, realizing his statement could have been offensive. "Not that you're not normal, Kizzy," he informs her. "It's just, you're better than normal. You're supernormal."

"Are you sure you have time to take care of her?" Alexis asks in a voice that implies that she is most certainly sure that he does not. "You spend so much time at the precinct."

He shrugs, filling up the water bowl and wrestling with the bag of food. "I don't mind getting a dog walker. Oh, or maybe she can come with me!"

"Really, Dad?"

"She could be an asset to the team. I can train her to sniff out murderers!"

"Detective Beckett would _love_ that."

"This is what I like about Kismet. She doesn't even know what sarcasm is." Well. Except sometimes the way the dog stares at him, already he can swear she has an edgy sense of humor. He puts the food bowl and water dish on the floor next to the kitchen counter. Kizzy doesn't quite bound, but she does get up and walk over to inspect the offerings.

"Why is your dog limping," Alexis asks flatly in a tone that's not quite a question.

He's ready for this protest, at least. "She has a torn ACL, probably, but don't worry, I researched it on my phone as I was waiting for the paperwork to go through and in a lot of cases, surgery is a viable option, and Kizzy's young and healthy except for the knee."

"Surgery?" Alexis squeaks.

"It's only three or four thousand dollars, and obviously we'll have to watch her recovery, but that's such a small price to pay." He beams encouragingly as he squats and rests a hand on Kismet's back. She's eyeing the water and food skeptically, like perhaps she could be tempted to eat on her own time.

"Dad," Alexis says carefully. "Are you sure this is about the dog?"

"Of course it's about the dog," Castle replies. What else could it possibly be about?


	2. Chapter 2

He's so late to the next crime scene that he almost misses Beckett entirely - she's about to close her car door, and he has to sprint across the concrete lot. Her sugar-free vanilla latte sloshes all over the coat that he _just_ had Kizzy's hair dry-cleaned off of.

"Big date last night, Castle?" she asks, arching an eyebrow at him and stepping back up out of the car. Her voice is normal and her eyes don't have that tight, disappointed look they sometimes get, but – it's not that she snatches the coffee away, not even close, but her fingers don't linger on it, so that they're simultaneously touching the cup, the way they sometimes do. The way they often do, lately.

He's about to tell her, he really is. But he hasn't talked to her in the two days since he's gotten Kizzy, and there's suddenly something that makes him hesitate, a lump in his throat that it's difficult to speak through. Didn't he agree with her, the last time they talked about it, that it would have been silly to keep Royal, that he didn't have enough time for a dog? And then he can't help thinking back to just before that conversation, when they'd been crouched on opposite sides of the room, fighting over an animal that he'd had absolutely no desire to fight over. More than anything, it's the memory of that fission that makes him pause, and then she's talking.

"Never mind," she says, and the little bit of flatness in her tone brings him around.

"No, no date, unless you count a movie with Alexis – Just a crazy morning."

"Right," she says, narrowing her eyes at him slightly. He's not sure what to say to counter her obvious disbelief, so he stands there awkwardly until she sighs and continues. "Get in. I'll fill you in on Mr. Schenectady on the way to the precinct."

"Is it a juicy one?" he asks hopefully, trying to recover from the stilted conversation.

"Not unless you count the jug of Tropicana he was carrying that spilled everywhere when he was shot," she responds with a wry smile.

"That sounds excessively messy," he says, opening the car door. When he sinks into the passenger seat, he feels the press of a milk bone in his back pocket – when did _that_ get there? – and, remembering the slightly querulous look Kizzy gave him on his way out the door, he resolves that he'll escape for a long lunch to check on his dog.

* * *

><p>Though they wrap Schenectady's death quickly – Castle had the shifty-looking brother pegged from the moment he first saw him – another body drops a day later. He gets her call when he and Kizzy are bounding through Washington Square Park. Well, she's doing her arrhythmic lope, and he's puffing along beside her, sure that's he's seconds from a cardiac arrest, but, at any rate, they're as close to bounding as the two of them will get.<p>

"Hey, Beckett," he puffs into the phone as he stops. Kizzy hits the end of the leash, turns, and stares reproachfully.

"We've got a – what's wrong with you?"

"Just going for a run." He tries to sound nonchalant, but he's still gasping desperately for air. Next time, he vows, he and Kizzy are going to bound at a far more moderate pace.

"It's eighteen degrees out, Castle."

"No weather can prevent me from keeping up with my manly musculature." He almost sounded in control of his breathing, there, but then he coughs, and, embarrassingly, he keeps coughing. There's this tickle in his lungs and a coppery tang in his mouth. He vaguely hopes that he's not dying. Kizzy bumps her head up against his hand. She's gradually thawed to him in the handful of days they've been together, enough that he's sure if he collapsed in the park, bleeding from his mouth and eyeballs due to an unfortunate case of overexertion in the freezing temperatures, she'd run and find some way to procure medical attention for him.

"It doesn't sound like you'll make it to the scene," Beckett says. He wants to protest, but the tickle is there in his lungs, and he has to swallow down a cough. "Just meet us at the precinct when you recover." She clicks the phone off before he can say anything. He can't tell if she was angry or just in a hurry, and he doesn't like that he can't tell.

He hates missing scenes, especially given that this his second miss in as many days, but Kizzy's looking up at him with liquid eyes, and it will take a while to walk home, and he's not sure he has much of a choice.

* * *

><p>When he tells her he's sick two weeks later, it's the first time he's really flat-out lied to her, possibly ever.<p>

Of course, that's not the whole of it. Since she came back after the shooting, his life has been evasions and obfuscations, shadowed half-truths and omissions that are worse, so much worse, than a small lie. This lie, he'll fully admit, is ridiculous. Every time over the past two weeks that he's quietly slipped away early or during lunch or for an extra-long coffee break, the words "Gotta go check on the dog" hover at the edges of his consciousness, but now the entire situation's gotten away from him and he's not sure what to do about it.

"Stomach thing," he explains, digging the hole a little deeper, when she asks if he's okay. He's on his way out the door, taking Kizzy to a vet appointment that he's already rescheduled twice so that he could be at the precinct – the dog's displayed a healthy wariness of Martha, who has no desire to take her, and Alexis' new internship consumes her weekday hours.

Beckett mentions stopping by later, and he agrees in a kind of noncommittal way that guarantees she won't make the effort. She's been like this, the sixteen days since he got the dog, a little questioning, a little tentative. Sometimes, he thinks he's just waiting for some indication that she cares enough to ask him point-blank what the hell he thinks he's doing.


	3. Chapter 3

When he swings his door open and sees Beckett standing there, he knows he's in trouble.

"You're not sick," is the first thing she says, even though she's been staring at him for two seconds tops. She's a detective. She can tell when people are faking. She thrusts a container of soup at his chest and turns on her heel, walking away at a clip just short of a jog.

"Than – oh – hey – wait," he stutters, tripping over himself to trot down the hallway after her.

She's nearly at the elevator by the time he manages to catch her elbow, and she whirls so quickly that he flinches, ready to take a punch. "Let. Go," she growls, deadly serious.

"Just come back – just for a minute, just let me explain," he says, trying not to sound too pathetic.

"No," she says, yanking her elbow out of his grasp. He can see her suck in a breath of air, her chest rising and falling in a sharp shudder. "I don't know what's been going on with you lately, Castle, but I would have hoped that even if you didn't want to wait anymore you could have at least told –" she cuts off abruptly and sets her jaw, eyes glinting, and he can tell from the twitch of her fingers and the clench of her teeth that she's at least as angry with herself as she is with him.

He feels the realization settle softly over him. His brain, always narrating, wants to be charitable, helpfully giving him metaphors about his moment of enlightenment bowling into him like an overly-large African game animal, but the truth is that every curious look she's given him over the past two weeks has added up to this, to the inevitable conclusion that he's cannonballed into what would clearly be a serious relationship. "That's not –" he starts, but she cuts him off with clipped, staccato sentences.

"Look – it's okay. I've got to go. There's this case. I was just stopping by." She starts to spin back toward the elevator, but her eyes trip to something just over the point of his shoulder, and then he can hear Kizzy's odd lope thumping down the hallway. The dog stops next to him and noses his calf, checking in, probably hesitant after the angry voices and sharp whispers. She's standing closer than normal, and the chuffs of air against his leg have, he imagines, a worried edge. He cards his hand through the fur behind her ears.

"Kizzy, this is Detective Beckett. Beckett, this is Kizzy," he says. By way of introductions, it's not the most auspicious – Kizzy is definitely wearing her suspicious stance, and Beckett still looks like she's a breath away from tears or punching him in the face. But then Kizzy takes a tentative step toward Beckett, gently pushes her cold nose against the detective's clenched fist, and he can see a thread of tension uncoil itself from around her, and he thinks, just maybe, that it might all work out.

* * *

><p>He's been talking at her for fifteen minutes, starting with the story of stumbling across Kizzy in his spur-of-the-moment visit to the Humane Society and ending with today's recent vet appointment.<p>

Beckett's hands are wrapped around a mug of warm coffee, and she's sitting on the couch, finally looking slightly less on edge. Kizzy's lying next to her, gigantic head resting on her thigh, and Beckett, consciously or unconsciously, keeps threading her fingers through the dog's hair. He's sitting on the armchair nearest the couch; Beckett had shot him a death glare as he approached earlier that made him hesitate to sit any closer.

"So why lie?" is finally her only question.

This is the part that he can't quite understand himself, and it takes a minute to cobble together an answer. "I didn't mean to, not at first," he says, thinking back to the crime scene two days after he got Kizzy, to the words, bubbling up in his throat, that he pushed back down. "I wasn't sure how to start, what to say. And then – it snowballed, like these things do, until I knew I couldn't tell you without hurting you, and I knew I didn't want that."

Her lip is caught between her teeth and her eyes are shining a little too suspiciously in the soft light of his apartment. "Now it's too late," she says, voice low. "Now it hurts no matter what."

He is suddenly, endlessly sure that this has nothing to do with Kizzy, not for either of them. It's a painful kind of relief, this thought that she, too, is keeping something. "It's worth it, though," he says. He won't bend on this point, though he's not sure what else to say, not _everyone has secrets_ or _also, while we're talking about this, I've been talking to a shadowy man about your mother's case for a while, and sorry it slipped my mind. _

"Yeah," she says, still looking far too distant, and he thinks maybe she needs more from him.

"I like taking care of her," he tries to explain. "She's not – she's not a needy dog, but it felt good, to be the one to bring her home."

"Because she's damaged," Beckett says flatly.

"No," he says, vehement, although he can't explain why it feels so good to take care of this animal, can't vocalize this horrifyingly crushing need he has that started coiling in his chest years ago, that wound tight over a horrible summer, to care for something, to care for anything that will let him.

He swallows harshly, feeling a burn at the back of his throat, the inside of his eyelids. He finds he can't stand the distance between them anymore, feels the desire for movement sizzling through his muscles, and almost without his conscious permission he's moving from the armchair to the couch, sliding down onto the supple leather so that he and Kizzy are on each side of her, hemming her in. "Castle," she sighs, but it's less of a protest now, more acceptance.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I'm sorry for lying." Her lips are so close.

"Me too," she murmurs, her eyes slowly mapping his face, and he's not quite sure what to make of that, but before he can get further she's standing. Kizzy lets out a surprised whine. Beckett reaches down, scratches the dog's forehead. "I gotta get back to the Precinct."

"We're done at the vet. I can – can I come?"

Beckett steps back, silently regarding the pair of them. "Why don't you take today," she says, not sounding angry or sad or edgy, just a kind of resigned quiet.

"I didn't want to hurt you," he offers, feeling hollow, feeling that he's not sure what else he can give.

"It's not that," she says. "I promise."

He can't think of what else to say; the conversation's been slipping away from him since the first moment and he's not sure what protest would be best, so in the end, he can only murmur, "Okay," and hope that tomorrow will go better.

* * *

><p>x<p>

Thank you so much to everyone who's reviewed! I want to give you a suitable metaphor for how happy it makes me on my insides every time my gmail politely informs me I have a new present of words from you (yes, YOU!), but I am not as of yet quite sure what that metaphor would be. Something about puppies is too obvious; snowflakes, even though I would kill for a good blizzard right now, are probably a little cliche; it's not the season for Christmas elves, and, well, they've been done before. Maybe something about how I'm sick and every review is like a magical kind of pill that combines DayQuil and love and that transports me to the upper levels of the stratosphere, not in a scary "Oh my God I'm forty thousand feet above the earth and now I am going to die" type of feeling, more like in a "I can achieve my dreams! The world is my oyster! Anything is possible!" kind of way.

... I know that that's a smilie instead of a metaphor. And that it is not a grammatically correct sentence. And that it makes no sense at all. I'm sorry. I'll try harder for next time. Suggestions welcome.


	4. Chapter 4

Tomorrow is worse.

The new case is a Crip from the Lower East Side, stabbed outside an apartment building in the early hours of the morning. He can't tell why Beckett's a little off, the stab wounds to the chest of the vic or the ripple of his idiotic secret, but he figures it out when he catches her pouring over a thick file as she finally starts wolfing down the bear claw he'd brought her hours ago.

He sits beside her. "Dana Landau," she says, shortly, before he can so much as open his mouth. A successful middle-aged lawyer, left behind two teens and a broken husband. It's been weeks since a break, but not for lack of trying.

"How's it –" he begins, but she cuts him off.

"Gates wants to cold-case it," she says abruptly. "I'm about to go meet with her."

He tilts over, leafing through a couple of the papers. "I didn't know," he says.

"She just called me in yesterday morning to talk about shelving it. Gave us a day," Beckett says shortly.

That explains some of Beckett's standoffishness the day before – not just the secrets after all. "You find anything new?" he asks, redundantly. They've been working hard at it, chipping away whenever they get a free breath, but the leads have all dried up.

Before she can answer, Gates is stepping into her doorway, calling, "Beckett."

"Can I –" he starts, but she shakes her head sharply at him as she stands, sets her jaw, and walks over to Gates' office.

"This is _not _going to go well," Esposito murmurs, shaking his head a little.

Ryan looks away from the office. "So, a secret dog?" he asks, clearly grasping at anything that's not the inevitable argument in the Captain's office.

"Is it a mutant?" Esposito asks, following Ryan's lead.

"Have you been dressing it up in little doggy sweaters?"

"Is it a Shiatsu? A Chihuahua? Oh, or a Pomeranian?"

"Are you going to take it to dog shows?"

"It's a perfectly normal dog," Castle says, affronted.

"Well there must be something wrong with it, for you to have hidden it from us," Ryan replies with a glare.

Castle can't help but glance over at Gates' office. Beckett looks like she's yelling. Gates looks like she's yelling. He forgets what Ryan said. "This isn't good," he murmurs, and right as he does Beckett storms out of the office.

"One week suspension, effective immediately," she hurls at them as she yanks her jacket off her chair.

"Shit," Esposito says. "Beckett, hang on, we can get a beer for lunch at the Old –" but she's already walking away, steps fast and clipped.

"Well," says Ryan, "I actually thought that could have been worse."

"At least she's not fired," Esposito adds.

"I should go," Castle says, not quite sure what his plan is, but knowing that he has to do _something._

"Luck!" Ryan calls as Castle bolts toward the elevator.

* * *

><p>He knocks and then steps down the hall, leaving Kizzy sitting patiently in front of her door. Beckett takes a minute longer than usual to open up, and he's not sure whether she's upset or reluctant to see him or just unable to see the dog through the peephole.<p>

She's all tense edges and sharp lines, but she softens a little at the sight of the dog sitting there, blinking up at her. "No fair," she says, turning down the hall to face him. Her voice has the slightest nasal tinge, and her eyes are rimmed with red.

"Never said I was fair," Castle says, stepping in front of the door.

She moves out of the doorway, gestures vaguely with her forearm for him to come in.

He grabs Kizzy's leash and drags her inside before Beckett can possibly reconsider.

"So," he says as she sinks onto her couch. He unclips the leash as he sinks onto the couch next to Beckett. Despite his mental warning, the dog pops up right next to him. "Kizzy," he whispers sharply, the warning vibrating in his throat.

"It's okay," Beckett says on a sigh.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," she murmurs, pulling her legs up underneath her, folding her hands on her lap.

"Okay," he replies. He runs a hand along Kizzy's back, waiting.

"It was stupid," she says, running a hand through her hair. "I was stupid."

"It wasn't stupid," he says. He feels off-balance, unsure what to say to drag a smile from her. A dead mother. An unsolved murder. A one-week suspension. "But, hey, you get a whole week off."

"Just great," she huffs, sinking deeper into the pillows.

"We could go to Paris!" She stares at him. He scales back. "Mexico? Bermuda."

"I am _not_ leaving the country with you, Castle."

"Napa Valley? The Outer Banks?" Her terrifying, blank look makes him reel it in a little more. "The Hamptons?"

"This is my fault," she says. "I should have been more clear. I'm not leaving the city with you, Castle. Besides, don't you have a dog to take care of now?"

He decides to dig in where he can. "A dog who would love it if you would accompany us on our walk. And then maybe to a late lunch." He glances at his watch. "Early dinner."

She blinks slowly, her eyelashes holding against one another for a moment, and he thinks he can almost see the damp sparkle of an unshed tear for the space of a breath, but then she's looking at him, only a little fragile, a little brittle. "I can't tonight," she says, voice thick.

He wants to push. He loves people, and he thinks there's no situation that can't be made better with good company. But she's not like him. "Tomorrow," he says, though the thought of her, miserable and alone in her apartment, gnaws at his chest. "Breakfast tomorrow."

"Castle, I don't –" she starts, but she stalls out.

He wonders if it's written across his face, the three months he can't stop thinking back to, those sleepless nights hovered over his phone, his mind awash in the memory of her blood. He'll do it - spend a week away from her, knowing she's hurting, waiting for her to call; he'll do it because he doesn't know what else to do, but the thought of it twists into a cold, hard knot deep underneath his sternum.

"Okay," she breathes. "Breakfast."

"And a walk," he says, knowing he has to pin her to it.

"And a walk," she murmurs, a little bit hollow. He doesn't like the look in her face. He wants to, needs to trust that she'll meet him in the morning, but he can't, anymore, can't find it in himself to trust that she'll be there for anything that's not at least tangentially threaded to a murder. He thinks from the way she's looking at him, hurt dancing across her shadowed eyes, that she might understand how hard it is for him to believe her in this, but there's nothing he can do to make that better.

Kizzy chooses that moment to wriggle abruptly across his lap, roll onto her flank, and push her head awkwardly against Beckett's side. "Ooooof, dog, this cannot be comfortable for you, either," he says, the air whooshing out of his chest as he shifts to adjust to the brunt of her weight on his thighs. "Next week we're going to discuss the concept of a lap dog," he tells Beckett. "It's on my calendar."

A small smile twists at the edges of her lips. She absently runs her hand through the dark hair over Kizzy's shoulder. "Try and pretend you don't like it, Castle," she says.

"Keep her," he blurts, before he can even think it through.

"What?"

"Just for tonight. You still have the stuff I left here when Royal was around?" _Of course not, idiot, that was weeks ago_, he thinks to himself, but Beckett surprises him by nodding once, sharply.

"Yes. But I don't know, Castle," she says, her hand still moving over Kizzy's shoulder.

He might not have thought it through before he spoke, but he realizes, now, that he needs the dog to stay here more than she does. If she has the dog, he'll have to see her again, and soon; if she has the dog, he won't have to think about her sitting fragile and isolated in her apartment. "Please," he says.

He thinks back to when she insisted that Royal needed one home, but it's not true; they can make it work, can make anything work, and he's about to insist when she speaks. "One night. Don't try to pawn this moose off on me just because you've realized it costs hundreds of dollars a day to feed her."

"Shhhh, you'll turn her anorexic," he says, trying his best not to beam. He thinks, from the answering light in her eyes, that he's not entirely successful.


	5. Chapter 5

He shows up half an hour early, but he makes himself wait for fifteen minutes at the end of her hallway, distracting himself by playing angry birds and compulsively checking the time every minute and a half.

When she opens the door she's wearing a tight black shirt and jeans. Her hair is up in a messy ponytail. His fingers twitch with the need to touch her, run his palm over her arm or her neck or drag her by her shoulders into a tight hug. Luckily, Kizzy is standing beside her. He channels his impulse into an action that won't get him kneed in the groin, stepping forward, bending down, and wrapping his arms around the dog. She snuffles into his shoulder, bumps her nose against his neck, and his throat feels suddenly, embarrassingly tight.

"It's been fourteen hours, Castle. You're not coming home from a three-month tour." The smile in Beckett's voice pulls his face away from Kizzy's neck.

"The bond between man and dog is as mysterious as it is powerful," he says sagely, swallowing through the lump in his throat as he looks up at her. The light in her eyes, something almost like affection shining out of her, freezes him in place until she speaks again.

"Let's go, Castle," she says, brushing a hand over his trapezius. Her touch rattles through him, a hot spike of awareness shooting all the way down to his toes.

He insists that she take the leash ("Unless you want to ride her, Beckett – I wonder if they make dog saddles") and she insists that he wear one of her hats ("I don't care how warm you say it is, Castle, it's the middle of _winter_") and twenty minutes later they're threading through people on the sidewalk, moving at a clip several miles an hour faster than that of the typical New Yorker.

"I didn't realize what a horrifying team you and my dog would make," Castle pants after several quick miles.

"She's got long legs, Castle. Don't tell me you're trying to turn her into an ambler."

"I prefer to think of it as a Scenery Enjoyer," he says, glaring. "Kizzy likes to appreciate the curves of every blade of grass. The contours and arcs of the sidewalks. The sweep of –"

"I didn't realize she was so literary, Castle."

He's been walking half a step behind Beckett, content to enjoy her presence and the thin warmth of the winter sun. Now, he hops forward and wraps a hand around her elbow to tug her back to a normal speed before he fully thinks it through. Then they're walking with his fingers wrapped around the soft bulk of her jacket and he's half reveling in the nearness, half prepping for a sharp and sudden pain when she inevitably breaks his pinky finger. "Sometimes it's nice to not just plow mindlessly ahead," he murmurs, finally managing to force his fingers off her jacket.

"Like you would know," she chuffs, her face breaking into a smile as she looks at him. "It's really hard to take you seriously in that hat."

He tugs the brown wool further over his ears. "_Somebody_ kept insisting I would get pneumonia without it." They're walking so closely, and she hasn't yet made the effort to move away from him. His knuckles graze over hers, the skin of both their hands slightly chilled (the hat might have been a good idea), the tingling numbness making him more hyperaware of the flickering contact.

"I would have wound up driving you to the hospital," she says, then, shifting gears, "Are we having this breakfast at your apartment?" He's towed them around a corner that sets them on the path back to his loft.

"I have the makings of some seriously quality pancakes," he says.

"You're lucky I'm hungry," she replies, rolling her eyes as the back of their hands drag slowly along each other.

He wants to ask her what's going on with her – she's so warm, so open compared to how she was the night before, but he's not willing to mention it in case she draws away again. When he chances another glance at her, she's watching Kizzy. He has a theory. "You slept with my dog," he says.

Her head whips around and she pins him with a champion glare. "I did not," she says immediately, a little too reflexively, before crinkling her nose briefly. She must know the too-quick response was a tell.

"You have that afterglow."

"Afterglow."

"Yes. Unmistakable. The _I-Spent-The-Night-Snuggling-With-Castle's-Dog _afterglow. Don't be embarrassed. She's a wonderful snuggler."

"We are not having this conversation," she says, huffing an irritated breath, but all the way back to the loft, the ridges of their hands whisper together.

* * *

><p>Her forearm brushes across his stomach when she's reaching for the milk and he's cracking an egg.<p>

He feels the muscles in his abdomen leap, feels the shock of it in the triple-time thump of his heart.

"Sorry," she murmurs, retreating to her section of counter.

She's looking a little distant, again, like she has a few times this morning, her eyes losing focus, the slope of her shoulders tilting up slightly. He tries to draw her out of it. "You're free to feel me up any time, Beckett," he says.

She hums a quiet laugh in the back of her throat, shakes her head, peers into the bowl. "This is a ton of batter."

"Alexis'll feast on the leftovers as a post-internship snack," he says.

Her eyes are back with him, now, the corners crinkled in a hint of a smile. "How's she doing?"

"She loves it – well, the being out of the house and working part, anyway. She has told me on several occasions that she's pretty sure property law is not for her," he says, shaking his head.

She watches his arm as he whisks the batter. "I thought I was going to be a lawyer for a while," she says absently.

"When was –" he starts, catching himself too late.

She slides her teeth over her lower lip, her throat working as she swallows. "I'm glad I'm a cop," she murmurs, almost like she's convincing herself, and he suddenly realizes she's not only thinking about her mother.

He puts the whisk down. "You can't solve every case, Kate."

"Like hell I can't," she says, voice low and dangerous, and he can see the edges of Dana Landau's murder starting to brush against her, can see it in the brittle way she sets her jaw.

"Kate," he starts, saying her name like a talisman, trying to bring her back to him, trying to draw her away from the snarled threads of the unsolved murder.

It almost works. "I haven't been suspended from anything before," she says, pressing her lips together and shrugging. He imagines she'd be more upset about that if it wasn't overshadowed by the loose ends of the murder, but unsolved cases have a way of dwarfing everything else for her.

"My sophomore year of high school," he starts, grabbing a ladle to spoon the pancakes onto the griddle.

Kizzy chooses that moment to saunter over and flop down gracelessly over Beckett's feet, and that pulls her the rest of the way back to him. "I can already tell this is going to be debaucherous," she says, pulling a small smile across her face.

He grins, drizzles batter on the griddle, and starts his story.

Two hours later, he's run out of excuses to keep her. He'd grabbed her jacket, thinking maybe he could come up with a ploy to get her to stay a minute longer, but in the end all he can do is step behind her and help her shrug into it. He's a little slow, a little awkward, unwilling to let her go after the easy conversation over far too many pancakes. The collar lumps up at the top of her spine as he helps her slide her arms into the sleeves. He reaches out to smooth the fabric, and, in the process, his fingers brush along the soft hairs at the base of her skull.

He sees her back contract and her shoulders draw up, hears her suck in a sharp breath of air, but he finds he can't move his fingers from the soft warmth of her neck, can't stop himself from drawing his hand slowly along the ridges of her vertebrae. They stand frozen like that for seconds, minutes, hours, his hand slowly dancing along the back of her neck, her breath shuddering in and out, in and out. He thinks he would be happy to stay like this forever, awash with desire, reveling in the feel of her warmth underneath his fingers.

A sharp sound startles him – Kizzy, yipping in her sleep from somewhere in the living room – and he abruptly drops his hand. Beckett jolts away from him and starts at the door. "I gotta go," she says in a rush, reaching for the handle.

"Beckett," he says, wanting to reach out, turn her back toward him by her shoulder, but he's not sure how much more contact he can take right now. "Kate," he tries when she doesn't stop.

She pauses, half turns toward him. "Thank you, Castle," she says. "This was – this was good."

"Come back for dinner," he says quickly, the words stumbling awkwardly away from him.

She sighs, worrying her lip between her teeth. "I don't think I'm very good company right now," she finally says.

He starts to protest that she's been excellent company, but it would be different, he knows, with Martha and Alexis. _Space_, he reminds himself, _she heals with space_. "Take Kizzy again," he tries, knowing all the while what her answer will be to that.

She finally turns to face him, anger flashing through her eyes. "I can take care of myself, Castle," she growls. She opens her mouth to say more, but she stops herself, shaking her head and clenching her jaw, holding back.

He can't stop the flash of the summer from writing itself across his face. "I know you can," he says, quietly, choking back the rest of what he wants to say – _It's not just about what _you _need._

She must see it anyway, or see the hurt in his eyes, because the anger in her face melts away and she heaves a sigh. "I can come for breakfast tomorrow," she says, slowly, like the words are unsticking from her throat.

He feels suddenly guilty – she let him in the night before, she agreed to take Kizzy, she came on their walk and she stayed for breakfast and she smiled and joked with him, and now he's asking even more. "No," he murmurs, "I'm sorry."

She stares at him for a moment, and then, before he can process, she's stepping forward and brushing her lips along his cheek, stopping just short of the corner of his mouth, drawing back before he can do anything more than suck in a startled breath. Her eyes have a hint of their dangerous sparkle back in them. "I'll be here at eight," she says, and before he can respond she's slipping out the door.


	6. Chapter 6

"Beckett! Thank God! Come in, quick, it's unlocked!"

The door crashes open and she bursts inside, all tense arms and edgy eyes. "What? What is it?"

Castle spares a long second admiring how vibrantly alert she is at 7:55 in the morning, but he doesn't move from his post over the dog. Kizzy is currently sprawled on the floor, completely covered by the overlarge throw from the couch. "I think Kizzy is -" he drops his voice to a low, serious whisper, "_mentally retarded_."

Beckett crosses her arms. "You have got to be kidding me," she says.

He can tell immediately that she's not going to be inclined to treat this situation with the seriousness that it deserves. "No, no, you need to hear me out," he says, holding out his hands in supplication. Kizzy's form stays limp under the blanket.

Her arms stay crossed. "I'm listening."

"We were just playing Find the Treat, like we do, you know, and I decided to hide a treat under a Solo cup that I found in the bottom of the closet from the Christmas party." His eyes start to glaze, but he immediately refocuses on the topic at hand – this is too important to indulge himself in a moment of fond remembrance. "And Kizzy saw me hide it, but she didn't even try to knock the cup over. She just sat there and stared at me." He pauses. "Kind of like you're doing right now." It becomes clear Beckett is not going to comment until he explains why the dog is under a blanket. "So I googled Dog IQ Test, because it's important to know these things, and one of the other tests was seeing if the dog can extricate itself from underneath a blanket. And she's just been _lying there _for _minutes_." Surely, Beckett isn't speaking because she's busy pondering all the ways to emotionally support him in his time of need. "I have such a brilliant child," he finally says, mournfully, "it figures that I would get my comeuppance in the form of an intellectually disabled dog."

"Did it ever occur to you, Castle, that maybe the dog thinks your games are stupid, and she's just patiently waiting for you to stop harassing her?"

"No," he says.

Beckett rolls her eyes, crosses the room, and pulls the blanket off Kizzy. The dog bumps her forearm with her snout, licks her hand twice, turns to stare reproachfully at Castle. "I'll try to be here to protect you next time, Kizzy," Beckett tells her, running her hand along the dog's spine.

"Not fair teaming up on me," Castle says, but for some reason, it doesn't really bother him.

Beckett rolls her eyes at him. "Feed me, Castle."

* * *

><p>He kisses her because he's not sure how else to stop her from leaving.<p>

He knew he wasn't going to just roll over and put her coat on (again), not after the way she was smiling at him over omelets. It had started like the day before, her slow withdrawal as they cleared plates, except when she'd stepped forward and he'd moved sideways they'd crashed, the angle of her hipbone jutting sharply into his thigh. "Jesus," he heard her exhale under her breath as he'd stood there, feet frozen to the ground. "You've been bumping into me more in the last two days," she'd continued, louder, smiling as she shook her head, and he murmured something offhand and nonsensical about her magnetic pull, but the whole incident set him buzzing with a kind of energy that he hadn't been able to shake.

He hadn't meant to initiate anything with the kiss – he really hadn't. He'd tugged at her hand as she stepped toward the door, felt their fingers knock against each other, skin catching and sliding over skin, dry and electric, and before he knew it he was stepping closer, falling into her pull. She must have tilted, too, because he'd only meant to breathe the same air as her, to leach a little more of her warmth into himself and to give a little more of his warmth to her, but suddenly where there should have been air there was instead the supple bow of her lips.

He'd been a little scared of what she'd do to him – he'd predicted her inflicting any number of different kinds of bodily harm upon him, he'd predicted her bolting out the door, he'd predicted her drawing her gun and arresting him for some kind of indecent assault. What he didn't understand was the current of desperation vibrating just beneath her placid smile.

He understands now, now that she's walked them backwards so that he's pressing her against the door, now that her tongue is in his mouth and she's tugging his shirt up, up over his stomach, raking her nails along his ribs, now that a moan is vibrating through her throat. He understands and he makes himself still his hands, which have been smoothing circles over her back. "Beckett," he says, his voice managing to cant up and then down and then up again in the space of the two-syllable name. His pulse is thrumming wildly. He leans his forehead into hers, tries again. "Beckett."

"Shut up," she growls, biting at his lower lip.

"You're maybe a little emotionally vul –" he starts, breathing out against her lips, but her foot winds around the back of his calf and the length of her body presses up against him, and somehow he's rucking her shirt up so that the smooth plane of her stomach slides over his, and then she's wrapping a hand around the back of his neck and pulling his head down to her.

"Stop thinking," she says as she slides a hand between them to work at the waistband of his jeans.

He does.

* * *

><p>The aftermath of first-time daytime sex is awkward.<p>

He's forgotten this, somehow; it _has _been a long time since he was having first-time sex of any sort, never mind while the sun was shining. He's not sure what to offer her in the wake of sixteen of the most exquisitely hot moments of his entire life up against the front door. They've only just eaten, so not breakfast. It's morning, so it would be ridiculous to try and tug her up to bed.

"Shower?" he finally croaks at her as she shimmies her jeans up over her hips.

She blinks up at him. "Are you saying I need a shower, Castle?" she asks throatily.

"No, no, it's just that after –" He stops when he catches a twitch of her lips. "Oh. You're messing with me. That's not nice."

"I probably should go," she says with a regretful smile.

"Help me walk my poor doubly-disabled dog," he says, the first thing he can think of.

She grins, and the awkwardness melts away. "I thought we were over that."

"Are you ashamed of her? Is that why you don't want to come?" The smoldering look she gives him makes him stutter for a moment. "On the walk," he clarifies. "With us."

"I _do _need to shower," she says.

"I have showers. And soap. And towels," he says helpfully.

She rolls her eyes at him. He focuses on projecting an air of endearing desperation, subtly toeing Kizzy in the leg to make sure that she's giving off the same aura. "After the shower and the walk –" she says threateningly.

"We'll release you."

She steps into him, close, slides her hand in front of his torso, holding her palm flat for him to shake. "Deal," she murmurs, closing her fingers around his palm as she leans in and brushes her lips over his.

"Deal," he echoes, a little breathless.

She draws away abruptly, walking over to the stairs and leaving him standing, adrift, next to the door. She doesn't turn, but she pauses for an instant, and he can imagine the quirk of her lips, the light in her eyes as she calls out, "You coming?"

He doesn't even try to curb his ridiculous smile as he starts after her. "I always am."

* * *

><p>X<p>

So… I know I labeled this "Complete." And it is complete in the sense that I've posted the stuff that I had mostly drafted already, and in the sense that I haven't left Beckett bleeding out in a cemetery or Kizzy getting diagnosed with rabies or something, and in the sense that I am probably not going to go write another bundle of chapters tonight, at least hopefully, because I really do like to get my sleep. But I am not saying that there will definitely never be any more of this, because it has been a lot of fun, and, I don't know, some of you keep giving me _ideas _for more things to write about here.


End file.
